So I have decided to divorce this setting from the OTU, or, at least, re-imagine it into a non-OTU ATU.

Thinking of this, I was toying with this idea for the last month or so, even before that thread on the MGT boards has become the last straw for me in regard to the OTU. I have several reasons to remove my setting from the OTU:

1) It is hardly OTU already. Even until now, I haven't cared much about Vilani, Darrians, Grandfather, Zhodani, the Marches, Imperial Nobility or the Reformation Coalition. The only OTU-ish things I was using were the Collapse, the AI Virus and the Aslan, with some touches of Solomani. But all of these are, more or less, generic sci-fi themes: Long Nights, felinoid aliens and AI empires are present in many sci-fi works. So why not have my own Dark Night, my own felinoid alien race and my own AI empire, and get rid of the OTU bother once and for all?

2) The licensing issues. If I use the OTU, I'll have to do various things in order to conform to the Foreven license, such as publishing the Solomani ship designs as ones present in Foreven and using CT stats for the rest. In a non-OTU setting I can easily use the entire MGT SRD with no problems at all, give everything MGT stats and be perfectly legal.

3) The vast amount of canon for the OTU - although some of it is VERY GOOD AND VERY WELL-WRITTEN - has an annoying tendency to hamper my creativity and lead to writer's blocks. The artistic freedom of an ATU would be a very good thing to have. For example, I can have my own aliens without thinking "how would that fit into the OTU?".

4) The OTU history is LONG, with everything being millennia-old. I like my worlds having a shorter history, of maybe several centuries at most.

So what I have in mind is a background containing many elements from my Shattered Federation ATU with many elements of the previous version of the Alkonost setting. You'll have Zoo-Builders, Celirans, Precursors and Inheritors alongside Laana, Alkonost, Kedeshius, Garland and the Incunablis Machine Empire.

The basic concept is the following:

The Consortium was the greatest civilization in recent history, a multi-species society - though predominantly Human and Celiran - enjoying great prosperity and progress, reaching up to Tech Level 15 (16 for experimental tech) and encompassing the unimaginably huge size of almost four sectors (circa 2,000 systems). Formed after the break-up of the old Apollo Federation in the First Civil War, the Consortium, governed by the Treaty of Cera Nayen, carefully integrated the various post-Federal splinter-states into a pluralistic, democratic polity where the various cultures could interact peacefully while maintaining local and regional autonomy. Technological advancement allowed for Jump-6 Mail Couriers, self-aware AI and cheap, safe star-travel.

But in its later years, in the Third and Fourth Centuries AT (After the Treaty), the Consortium began to decay and stagnate. The high-tech, vastly wealthy Core Worlds became decadent and introverted, while the Periphery's economy declined. Bit by bit, local interests and local loyalties began to eclipse the commitment to the Consortium as a whole. As the economy lost its momentum, local leaders began to chafe under the Consortium's rule. The Core's hedonist culture saw the Periphery's worlds as backward and uncultured, while the new populist leaders in the Periphery considered the Core to be a parasite over the local economies.

In 373 AT, these rivalries came to a head. Earth, a semi-Periphery industrial world in the Rimward section of the Consortium, declared independence, formed the United Terran Republic and nationalized corporate assets owned by Core concerns. Several other Periphery and semi-Periphery worlds followed suit and broke away. The Core responded by sending the Consortium's battle-fleets against the successor states. The Second Civil War has begun.

With the collapse of the central authority, most factions tried to grab what they can from the Consortium's wreckage, turning on each other in the fight over these scraps. Untold atrocities were committed by many factions. Eventually, by the late 390's, the flames of war began to dwindle to embers as the means of production and the weapons of war were, in most part, destroyed or badly damaged.

Then, in 397, new aliens, unheard of before, came into Known Space from the Coreward: the felids (place-holder name) and the Inheritors. Opportunists in nature, these aliens seized upon the Consortium's ruin as a chance to get rich and gain worlds and political power. The nomadic Inheritors took what they wanted from the barely-defended worlds of the former Consortium. The anarchic and semi-tribal felids became mercenaries, interstellar traders, pirates, and, sometimes, also local kings. And the damage done by this invasion added up with the massive damage caused by the Second Civil War.

This is how the Dark Night came into being. Most large starships were destroyed by more than thirty-five years of intense civil war; many worlds lay in ruin; trade was vastly reduced; technology declined as the interstellar economy collapsed. Worlds became separate, each abandoned to its own fate, or, at best, left as part of a small, shaky pocket-state linking a few worlds by a handful of small remaining starships.

Now it is the end of 449 AT, and, bit by bit, a few worlds are recovering from the war. It is a time when brave adventurers can strike out against the darkness - or strike rich in salvaging precious relics from the ruins of the old Consortium. Many new opportunities and challenges await!

Some inspirations for my ATU:

Dune (mostly for Laana - the Butlerian Jihad, Mentants, and for the Incunablis Machine Empire)Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars Trilogy (terraformation; semi-habitable worlds; strange colonial cultures and spirituality)S.T.A.L.K.E.R: Shadows of Chernobyl and S.T.A.L.K.E.R: Call of Pripyat (for Garland and Svoboda)Starflight I and II (great sci-fi computer games; inspiration for the Dark Night)System Shock I and II (for the Incunablis Machine Empire)Terminator (for the Incunablis Machine Empire)The Matrix (for the Incunablis Machine Empire)Larry Niven's Known Space, especially A Gift from Earth (especially for the Dense/Low worlds)Babylon 5 (for what is possible to do with psionics)History Channel's Life After People (for all the ruined worlds)TNE's Path of Tears (especially in terms of atmosphere)